A local youth soccer club plans to expand a complex that its Tucker Station neighbors fought in 2009 after its building was constructed without receiving Metro Board of Zoning Adjustment approval.

Javanon Soccer Club, at 12411 Rehl Road, has asked the Metro Department of Planning and Design Services to approve shifting the complex’s property lines to include about an acre of land it bought from neighbors Thomas and Sarah Jecker. The land will be used for practice if one of the facility’s two soccer fields is closed, club founder Ali Ahmadi said.

“When you practice seven days a week, they have a tendency to get worn down,” Ahmadi said of the fields. “We need some area that we can relieve some pressure to get fields seeded and reseeded, rejuvenate them again.”

Ahmadi started the soccer club in Louisville in 1989. The nonprofit organization obtained permits in 2007 to construct an indoor training facility — a 23,000-square-foot metal building, but because of a mistake by the city planning staff, plans for the building bypassed the zoning board.

The board finally approved the building’s construction in June 2009, more than a year after it was completed.

Members of the Tucker Station Neighborhood Association took issue with the after-the-fact approval and filed a lawsuit asking Jefferson Circuit Court to throw out the board’s vote.

They later dropped the lawsuit after the club agreed to plant trees around the building and block light coming from the windows near its roof, attorney and Tucker Station Road resident Steve Porter said.

“We have no objection to kids playing soccer,” Porter said. “Our problem was a building that was too big and too unsightly at the time it was built.”

Ahmadi said neighbors have come to enjoy the facility, and he sees residents walking and biking on the fields. His goal is to turn the complex into a park with landscaping and paths added as the club finds funds.

“We got caught up in some kind of dispute in the neighborhood, and now they’ve realized that we are really good neighbors and we’re providing a good service for their children and the children of the community,” Ahmadi said.

The soccer club has maxed out at about 300 players, who try out for traveling teams, and doesn’t have room to expand, Ahmadi said. It hopes to buy additional land from other neighbors in the future, to add practice areas and prevent other buildings from being constructed around it, but the club currently has enough money for only the 1 acre.

“In five years, we might be able to raise $50,000 or $60,000 to buy a field,” Ahmadi said.

Reporter Bailey Loosemore can be reached at (502) 582-4646. Follow her on Twitter at @bloosemore.